One of Singapore's most distinguished writers, her third novel, Fistful of Colours, was awarded the Inaugural Singapore Literature Prize (1992). A Bit Of Earth (2000) and a short story collection, The Lies That Build A Marriage (2007) were subsequently shortlisted for the same prize. Awarded a Fulbright grant in 1997, she is a Fellow of the International Writers' Program, University of Iowa, and the first Singapore writer honoured as the university's International Writer-in-Residence in 2000. Since then, she has also held writing residencies in Myanmar, the Philippines, South Korea and at the University of Western Australia in Perth. In 2011, she was the Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. In 2012, she won the South East Asia Write Award.In the UK, she has been Writer-in-Residence and also a tutor at the Arvon Foundation's Moniack Mhor in Scotland and has beeninvited to talk about her work at the Edinburgh International and Melbourne Book Festivals among others.